As it turned out, Dylan and Logan were planning a trail ride into the foothills—Logan hadn’t mentioned that—and they wanted to take Davie with them. The kid looked so hopeful, Tyler never thought of refusing—not that he had any right to say yes or no where Davie was concerned anyway.
“You could come with us,” Davie suggested eagerly, stooping to ruffle Kit Carson’s ears in belated greeting.
Tyler passed a glance in Dylan’s direction. “Apparently, I’m not invited,” he said. “Logan didn’t say a word about any trail ride when he came by here a little while ago to harass me.”
There had been something else Logan had wanted to say, something about Jake, though every time he’d gotten close to spitting out whatever it was, he’d veered off again. He’d mostly yammered on about the Tri-Star Cattle Company and how to err was human but to forgive divine.
Tyler did not aspire to divinity.
Dylan rolled his eyes. “Come on, Ty. What do you need—a printed invite? You’re welcome to ride with us and you damn well know it.”
Davie’s glance skittered from Dylan to Tyler. “If this is what having a brother is like,” he said, “I’m kind of glad I’m an only child.”
Tyler chuckled at that, in spite of his sour mood, and slapped the boy on the shoulder. “You go ahead. I’m going to call the repair shop in town—and maybe that truck of mine is ready to roll back onto the highway. It wasn’t when I checked before.”
Davie tensed, and his eyes narrowed. “You’re leaving?”
“No,” Tyler said quietly. “I just want my truck back.”
“Okay,” Davie said, relaxing a little.
Dylan was already moving toward the door. His gaze rested a moment on the Tri-Star papers Logan had left behind on the table, and Tyler wondered if they’d planned that early-morning recruitment effort between them. It seemed like something they’d do, but then again, Dylan wasn’t the sort to let someone else handle his dirty work. He’d have been right there, along with Logan, if he’d had any part in the scheme. “Just leave the Blazer at the shop if your truck is running again,” he said. “Kristy and I will pick it up later.”
Tyler merely nodded.
“You’re sure you won’t come along?” Dylan pressed.
The truth was, Tyler wouldn’t have minded a long trail ride up into the foothills, even if it meant spending time with his brothers. It had been too long since he’d been in the saddle, except to perform some lame-brained stunt for a movie camera. But he needed his own rig—he couldn’t drive Kristy’s Blazer forever. And besides, there were some other things he wanted to do.
“Maybe next time,” Tyler said, figuring there probably wouldn’t be a next time.
Dylan shrugged one shoulder and left the kitchen, headed outside, and Davie followed, though reluctantly, stopping on the threshold to try just once more. “It would sure be cool if you’d go with us,” he said.
Tyler’s throat tightened. He remembered asking Jake to come to the first basketball game of the season at Stillwater Springs High. It was his sophomore year, and he’d made the varsity team; the coach had promised he’d be on the court from the start, and he’d wanted his dad to be there. To be proud of him, maybe even nudge somebody sitting next to him in the bleachers with his elbow and say something embarrassing, like, “You see Number 22, there? That’s my son.”
Instead, Jake had blithely replied that he had a game that night himself—a high-stakes pool tournament, down at Skivvie’s. As an afterthought, on his way out the back door at the main ranch house, he’d told Tyler, “Break a leg, kid.”
Tyler had lost his taste for basketball after that, and taken up rodeoing instead—both Logan and Dylan, though still in high school, were already making more in prize money than they could have earned flipping burgers or sweeping floors someplace. And that was on the local circuit.
Anyhow, Tyler had decided, those shorts basketball players wore were just plain sissified, almost as bad as those stretchy shorts people wore to ride bicycles.
“I can’t make it today, Davie,” he said quietly, telling himself that it wasn’t the same as Jake’s refusing to watch a basketball game. Davie wasn’t his son—probably. “Tomorrow, you and I will find a couple of horses and saddle up. Take a ride of our own. How’s that?”
Davie looked partially appeased, but still disappointed, too. He nodded and left the house without another word. Drove off with Dylan.
“It’s just you and me now, dog,” Tyler told Kit Carson, as he took his cell phone from the counter, scrolled through his collection of numbers for the one for the auto-repair place in town and pressed the Call button.
Sure enough, the rig was ready. They’d installed a new muffler and done some work on the engine, too, though they recommended a total overhaul.
Tyler figured a trade-in would be easier—and cheaper.
He’d been a damn fool to swap his Escalade—though for him it was roughly in the same category as basketball shorts and ten-speed gear—for an old wreck of a truck.
He’d done it on impulse, shedding that too-fancy SUV the way a snake shed an old skin.
Now, he’d have to live with the consequences.
With that much settled in his mind, if not much else, Tyler loaded Kit Carson into the back of the Blazer and headed for town.
The bill for the towing, not to mention the repairs, probably exceeded the actual value of the truck. Tyler paid it just the same, chalking it up to penance for rash behavior, locked up the Blazer and gave the keys to the girl working the parts counter for safekeeping and took off.
He and Kit Carson stopped off at the lumberyard on the way out of town, and he ordered enough to shore up some of the stuff that was sagging out at the cabin, figuring he’d have the carpentry thing figured out once he’d replaced the small back porch and laid a new kitchen floor. He took a load home in the back of his pickup, too.
He felt ambitious, and hoped this enterprise wouldn’t turn out the way the truck deal had. But he had brand-new power tools, a hammer, a brown bag full of nails, and a lot of gumption. How hard could it be to rebuild the back steps and put in some new floorboards in the kitchen?
He picked up a few more groceries before leaving town, and then cruised casually by Doc Ryder’s place, hoping for a glimpse of Lily, but there was no sign of her or the little girl or of Doc himself.
Just call her, he thought.
“Oh, right,” he answered himself aloud, drawing a concerned look from Kit Carson, who was riding shotgun as usual. “I can hear it now. ‘Hello, Lily. This is Tyler. What do you say we get together and boink each other’s brains out again, just for the hell of it?’”
The dog whimpered. Maybe he thought he was getting chewed out for something. Or maybe he just disapproved of the turn the conversation had taken.
Tyler reached over and patted the mutt’s head. “You a moralist, Kit?” he asked affably.
He’d been back home for several hours, finding out the hard way that replacing a porch, even a pissant one like he had, was easier to think about than to do, when an old black-and-tan Buick sedan rolled into his driveway around noon, throwing up dust in every direction.
Shirtless, since sawing and hammering was hot work on a sunny day, even that close to the lake, Tyler straightened and wondered who his visitor was.
He didn’t have to wonder long.
Doreen got out of the dented Buick, dressed in her waitress getup and wearing a casino ID card pinned to her bodice. She’d troweled on th
e makeup that day, he saw, as she came closer.
“Is Davie around?” she asked, stopping about a dozen yards shy of close-up and eyeing poor old Kit Carson like he might spring at her and tear her throat out. Doreen had ridden with outlaw bikers and traveled with rock bands. And she was afraid of a stray like Kit?
But then Doreen was afraid of a lot of things these days, wasn’t she?
Tyler set his hammer aside, reached for his T-shirt and pulled it on over his head. He’d had plenty of vine-swinging, chest-pounding, Tarzan-type sex with this woman, back in the day, but now being half-dressed in front of her seemed wrong.
“Nope,” he answered. “He’s gone on a trail ride with Dylan and Logan.”
Doreen gnawed at her lower lip for a moment, and Tyler wondered if Roy had knocked her around a little the night before, or even that morning, so she had to cover up the bruises with war-paint, or if she’d just been heavy-handed with the stuff, hoping for better tips.
“Is he all right?” she finally asked.
“He’s fine,” Tyler said, approaching her. He wanted a closer look at her face, and when he got it, his blood stung in his veins like venom. He took a gentle but firm grip on Doreen’s chin and said, “The gunk isn’t working, Doreen. I can see the bruises.”
“Let it go, Tyler,” Doreen said. “Roy passed out before he did any real damage.”
“Looks to me like he did plenty of damage,” Tyler said, after unclamping his jaw. He was almost as angry with Doreen for putting up with that kind of treatment as he was with Roy for dishing it out. “When are you going to leave that bastard, Doreen? When are you going to stand up for yourself—and for Davie?”
“You don’t understand,” Doreen said, shrinking in on herself in that way she’d developed in the years since Tyler had first known her. In that way she’d passed on to Davie.
Tyler let his hand drop from her chin. Shook his head. “Oh, I understand, all right,” he told her grimly. “You’re going to let him do this again and again until he kills you.”
Doreen took a step back, rummaged in her big shoulder bag, brought out a sheaf of papers. Thrust them at Tyler.
“What’s this?” Tyler asked, even as he took the documents.
Evidently, this was his day for heavy-duty paperwork.
“I lied before,” Doreen said, her voice quivering a little. “Davie is yours. Roy says if he’s going to live with you, we’ll need some kind of compensation. So he had a friend of his draw up these papers, over in Choteau, at one of those legal places.”
“Compensation?” Tyler echoed, still absorbing the news that he was a father after all. He hadn’t completely believed Doreen before, when she’d said Davie’s father was a truck driver she’d “cheered up” one night after a shift at Skivvie’s. Contradictory though it was, he didn’t believe her this time, either.
“We want a hundred thousand dollars,” Doreen said, with all the bravado she could drum up. She was red at the jawline, and tears stood in her eyes. “Roy looked you up on the Internet. You’ve done real well for yourself, it seems, between the rodeoing and the movie work and all that. In fact, you’re flat-out rich.”
“And Davie’s suddenly mine, because I have money?” Tyler asked dangerously.
Doreen’s wet eyes widened, and she retreated another step or two. Kit Carson made that worried sound again, a low whine, far down in his throat. “You can spare a hundred thousand dollars,” she insisted.
“And you, obviously,” Tyler countered coldly, “can spare Davie . Provided the ‘compensation’ is right.”
Doreen swallowed visibly. “You can get blood tests, or whatever they do nowadays, you and Davie both. You’ll see that I’m telling the truth.”
Doreen wasn’t telling the truth; Tyler had played a lot of poker, with a lot of amateurs as well as pros, and he knew a stone-desperate bluff when he saw one.
“You don’t know who Davie’s real father is, do you, Doreen? Roy put you up to this because he smelled money.”
“You won’t miss it,” Doreen said, but for all the attitude she was projecting, she still looked as if she wished the ground would open up at her feet and swallow her whole.
“That isn’t the point,” Tyler argued. “The point is, Doreen, you’re basically offering to sell me your child.”
“He’d be better off with you.”
“He’d be better off with just about anybody,” Tyler replied, feeling sick to his stomach. “I know you’ve had it tough, Doreen, and I’m not discounting that. I’m really not. But how can you sell your own child? ”
“Like I said, Davie would have a chance if you kept him,” Doreen said, though she was still the personification of misery. “I’d know Roy wouldn’t hurt him again, and, well, me and Roy, we could make a new start someplace else. Someplace far away.”
“You’d just leave Davie? ‘So long, good luck, it’s been real’?” Tyler knew the exchange was pushing a lot of old buttons that had nothing to do with the kid and everything to do with the way he’d been raised, but knowing that didn’t change a damn thing. “Doreen, how can you do a thing like this?”
“Read those papers,” Doreen said, her chin high, but wobbling. “You sign them, and write me a check, and that’s the end of it. Davie’s your son, from that day forward.” With that, she turned and started to walk away, toward the battered old car she’d left running in the driveway.
Tyler stopped her, grabbed her arm and spun her around to face him. This time, he didn’t try to be as gentle as before.
“You don’t even know me, Doreen,” he rasped. “How can you be sure I won’t ditch Davie, or knock him around like Roy has? I’m a Creed, remember? You’ve been around Stillwater Springs long enough to figure out what that means.”
Doreen pulled free of his grip on her arm. Raised her chin again and looked him straight in the eye. He realized then that, bruised and broken though she was, jaded and disillusioned and barely holding on to the frayed ends of the proverbial rope, she was trying to save Davie. Oh, she wouldn’t mind taking the hundred grand she’d asked him for, but this wasn’t about the money. Like some wild, cornered animal, she was trying to lure the main threat—Roy—as far from her child as she could.
“Doreen,” Tyler said gruffly. “Don’t do this. We’ll figure out some other way.”
“There is no other way, Tyler. Don’t you think I’ve tried to come up with one?” She paused, swallowed again. “I’ve got to have an answer by tomorrow,” she finished, sliding behind the wheel of her car.
Tyler folded the documents, stuck them into his hip pocket, gripped the edge of her open car window as he leaned in to look at her. “Suppose I agreed to this—and I’m not saying I will. What would you tell Davie?”
A tear slipped down Doreen’s cheek, leaving a jagged trail through the goop she’d hoped would cover up the marks Roy’s fist had left. “‘Goodbye,’” she croaked. “I’d say, ‘Goodbye.’”
With that, she threw the car into Reverse and backed up, and Tyler was left with a choice between jumping back out of the way or losing some or all of his toes.
He jumped.
The rear wheels of that Buick threw up a lot of dust and gravel as she backed up, turned around and gunned the engine.
He stood there for a long time after she’d gone, watching the dust settle and trying to figure
out what the hell he ought to do next.
Call Logan? His eldest brother was a lawyer, and a good one. In addition to winning several world championships during his bronc-busting days, Logan had founded a legal-services Web site that had made him a rich man.
It had fattened Tyler’s bank account, too, since he’d invested all the cash he could scrape together, way back when, before the stock-splits and the big sale to some multinational conglomerate. He knew Dylan had done the same thing.
Yep, a sensible man would call his big brother, the legal eagle, and ask for advice.
But where Logan was concerned, Tyler wasn’t a sensible man.
He finally turned and started back toward the house. Sat down on what was left of the porch and took Doreen’s papers from his back pocket and read them—once, twice, a third time.
It was all there, cut-and-dried. There were no loopholes; as far as he could tell, the agreement was ironclad—and he’d always had a good head for contracts. No hidden clauses, no ifs, ands or buts that would come back and bite him in the ass in a week or a month or a year.
The plain, sad truth was, a fat check would buy him permanent custody of a troubled, pierced, tattooed kid who might or might not be his. Until Davie turned eighteen, he would be Tyler’s ward, at least in the eyes of the law.
His first instinct was to say yes, write the check and never investigate the paternity issue at all. He knew that would sound crazy to anybody who hadn’t been raised under Jake Creed’s roof, and it probably was crazy. He also knew he couldn’t change his own childhood by making things easier for Davie.
He just wanted to make a difference to one kid in trouble, that was all.
A week before, even a couple of days ago, he could have made the decision, for or against, without considering anyone else’s opinion. But now there was one person in his life whose opinion mattered a lot, and that was Lily.
Montana Creeds: Tyler Page 16